Age of Consent
by pr3tty-odd
Summary: It all started one Thursday in February when a student's portrait made French teacher, Clare Edwards, feel not only appreciated... but loved. Eclare. AU. FOUR-SHOT.
1. Chapter 1

Teacher Appreciation Week at Degrassi was held every year during the bleak days of early February. On Monday, Student Council members came around during first period and offered the teachers cups of Tim Horton's coffee. On Tuesday, an ice cream sundae bar was offered in the faculty lounge during lunch periods, and teachers helped themselves to multiple scoops of ice cream doused in caramel or chocolate syrup and puffs of whipped cream. Wednesday was a faculty jean day, Thursday was an early release schedule, and the whole school had Friday off, which of course, was far better than the coffee, ice cream, and jeans. French teacher, Clare Edwards, was looking forward to a snug afternoon on the couch in her small apartment, reading JK Rowling's _Casual Vacancy _while hiding from the harsh Toronto winter under her wool blanket. She was in high spirits when she entered school Thursday morning, looking forward to the next day.

On her way to the languages office, she ran into a small crowd of teachers gathered around the main bulletin board. Pamela Dawes, the eccentric studio art instructor, was working the crowd, beaming and pointing. Hanging on the wall, framed in black poster board, were paintings of various Degrassi teachers. The portraits were remarkably well done, rendered, Pamela was saying, by the Honors Studio Arts class. They were meant as an homage to students' favorite teachers, and the project had bee kept secret over the course of several months so they could be unveiled during Teacher Appreciation Week.

Hanging in one corner was a portrait of Mathematics teacher and coach of nearly every sport at Degrassi, Darryl Armstrong; his expression both haggard and kind, brandishing a fat piece of chalk at a freshly diagrammed equation. Below that was a painting of English teacher Laura Kwan, holding a copy of _Catcher in the Rye _- a personal favorite of hers - in her hands. Media Immersions instructor Winnie Oh's painting was just a simple black and white portrait of her face. In the very middle, and larger than the rest, was a beautiful portrait of Archie Simpson, the beloved principal who had been killed in a car accident just a few months earlier. The portrait depicted Archie sitting at a desk piled high with papers, and a manila folder in his hand. His facial expression was so close to the one that Clare remembered from faculty meeting, Clare felt goosebumps rise up on her arms. Above the portrait, in neat gold-painted writing, a small banner read: _Mr. Simpson 1974-2012 "Angels are bright still, through the brightest fell." We miss you. _A few teachers were gazing at Archie's portrait and wiping tears away.

Suddenly, Clare felt a shudder of recognition as she scanned across the bulletin boars and came across a pair of blue eyes that looked _very_ familiar.

Her eyes.

In the portrait, she was wearing her favorite shirt, a pink button-down from Macy's; except the artist had taken the liberty of unbuttoning the top two buttons so that a provocative line of cleavage, faint but unmistakable, began at the place where her shirt came together.

Clare was stunned. Unlike the other teachers on the wall, she had never been the type of educator who inspired love in her students. She was never interviewed for the school paper. She was never quoted in the yearbook. Alumni never came to visit her. She was the type of teacher who students forgot about nearly the moment they walked out of her class, most likely because many of them did not enjoy the required French class she taught. She didn't get the sense that they disliked her necessarily, but she wasn't a performer like some of the other teachers. She spent most of her time standing behind her podium, making her students recite conjugates, or sitting at her desk, her head buried in her grade book. She knew Darryl was popular among the jocks, and Winnie was popular among the hormonal teenage boys. She may have been only a few years younger than Clare, but she dressed in ways that teenage boys found more attractive and distracting.

The fact that students didn't like her very much was something that bothered her a great deal, so when she saw her picture hanging on the wall among the faces of other beloved faculty members, she was both stunned and pleased because she couldn't even begin to guess which student might have painted her, or why. It was clear that the artist had been watching her, _studying _her, so much that they could not have created a more accurate portrait than if she'd commissioned one herself. She liked it. It was honest, and yet it presented her in the best possible light: vulnerable but pretty, serious but not severe. She only possessed one other portrait of herself - a caricature that her father had bought for her at a carnival when she was thirteen. In it, her head was enormous, her braces ad exaggerated grill, the bump on her nose jutted out almost as far as her simian forehead. She hadn't thought it possible that the cartoonist could make her look even more grotesque than she felt in her cage of adolescence, but sure enough, he'd done it, and even though she begged her dad not to, he had hung it up in the living room, right above his piano. He genuinely thought his daughter looked beautiful in the portrait, ad Clare remembered the incident clearly because it was the first time she really understood the delusive power of love.

She thought about asking her students outright who had painted her, but she felt that she might come off as accusatory, and she also didn't want to embarrass anyone. She felt, instinctively, that the sensual nature of the painting - the the unbuttoned blouse, the cleavage, the elongated eyelashes - indicated that the artist was a boy. But there was a sensitivity in the work, an intuitive understanding, that pointed towards a more female perspective. It had to be an older student, since the underclassmen weren't allowed to take Honors Studio Art, so that eliminated her two French I classes. There were a few juniors in French II, but one of them, Luke Baker, openly disliked Clare because of a bad grade she had given him on a vocabulary project, and the other, Drew Torres , had handwriting so horrendous, that it was borderline dysgraphic, so Clare doubted her would have that kind of skill with a paintbrush. Plus, Drew slept for a majority of the class period, so he wouldn't be able to study her as well as the artist did.

So that left her two Honors French classes; thirty five students in all, an overachieving, sensitive bunch. The artist had to be in one of those, and she was determined to find out who it was. The class had just finished reviewing the sixth chapter of the text book, and that afternoon, as they sat bent over their quizzes, Clare took the opportunity to to scrutinize each of them. Not a single pair of eyes flicked up in her direction; they all seemed to be engrossed in their work. When the bell rang, and they all filed indifferently past her desk to turn in their quizzes, Clare began to think that perhaps the artist had only chose her because their favorite teacher had already been chosen by someone else, or worse, because her face was simple and uncomplicated and relatively easy to draw. But if that was true, why did the portrait contain such depth... such accuracy? The artist, whoever it was, had managed to capture a certain sadness in her, a truth, and the riddle of who had created it succeeded in haunting her for the entirety of her long weekend.

* * *

I know this is short, but I told myself I wouldn't go to bed until I posted this, so I figured this would be a good stopping point until the next chapter, which will hopefully be posted by tomorrow or Monday night at the latest. The next four chapters are going to be a bit fast paced, but will be much longer than this one.

I'm not requesting a certain number of reviews before I update, but I would really appreciated it if you would leave a review. :)


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N: **Thank you to everyone who left a review. I know I'm using other Degrassi characters as students (such as Drew and Luke), but some are going to be used as adults (such as Jake). I know it doesn't make much sense, but it's how the story works.

* * *

The following Monday morning as Clare headed to the language hallway towards her office, she passed by herself, the lonely expression unchanged, and the chalk-line cleavage still provocatively in place. It made her unaccountably sad; the idea of herself being pinned to a wall all weekend like a dead butterfly, staring out into an empty hallway of darkness.

It was still early in the morning; kids were only beginning to trickle in. Faculty members picked their way down the slippery hallways with their faces buried in scarves, and she furtively lifted a corner of the painting to search for a signature, a set of initials, anything to give her a clue. The portrait was unsigned, no traces of the artist's identity whatsoever. She began to casually ask around the department office for information, but didn't want to sound too interested. If they could see what a big deal it was to her, they would feel sorry for her; Armstrong and Kwan and Winnie, all of whom regularly received Christmas presents from students, who were high-fived in the hallway, who were asked to write college letters of recommendation, and whose faces all hung on the bulletin board, alongside her own.

When the bell rang at 3:00, she found herself walking upstream through the crowds, headed in the direction of the fine arts hallway. Clare had worked at the school for eight years, but had never actually been in the art studio. It was a dusty room, with a large row of windows that looked out onto the parking lot and flooded the space with grey light. Outside, it was snowing a little, the depressing, anemic kind of snowfall you can only get in February, when everything about winter has lost its charm. The room itself, though, contrasted with the depressing scene outside; it was warm, cozy, and messy, with bits of paper on the floor, tubes of paint and trays of chalk and colored pencils crammed on shelves against the walls. It smelled of fresh paper, acrylic, and the earthy, nostalgic saltiness of modeling clay. Student artwork was displayed everywhere - Chinese lanterns, sculptures made of lumpy ceramic and clay, copper wire animals, and portraits of all kinds. There were abstract geometric shapes, landscapes, still-lifes, architectural blueprints, collages, and photographs, some depicting color and others monochrome. Two girls, one with a high bun accompanied by chopsticks, and the other with long, curly hair, were standing around a cloth dummy, pinning up a dress that appeared to be made out of flattened pop cans.

Pamela Dawes stood in the middle of the room, bent over a table where one of Clare's Honors French students, Eli Goldsworthy, sat before a chalk canvas, so absorbed in his work that he wasn't even showing attention to his teacher.

"Miss Edwards!" Pamela said, straightening up. "Well, what brings you up to our neck of the woods?"

"Hi, Pamela," Clare said, looking around the unfamiliar room. "Hey, I just wanted to thank you for the nice surprise on Thursday. The paintings. What a nice idea."

"Weren't they just wonderful?" Pamela extended her arm enthusiastically. "But don't thank me - you should thank your portraitist! He did a wonderful job, didn't he?"_  
_

So, it was a "he" after all. She had been right about that.

"Well, I'd like to thank him," Clare said, "if I knew who he was."

"What? Well, he's sitting right here, isn't he?"

Bewildered, Clare looked around the room. There were the two girls around the dummy, their back turned to her. And there was Eli Goldsworthy.

"Eli?"

He was a senior, with dark hair that fell in his face, an attractive, childish face that seemed to never have a single blemish. He sat in the back of her class, rarely raised his hand, and because he was fluent in French and spent a year abroad, she'd often gotten the distinct feeling from him, the way he looked at her without really looking, his silence in class, and his slouched demeanor, that he was mocking her and her careful attempts at producing the proper 'r' sound from her throat. When he saw Clare in the hallways, he greeted her with a curt "hey," or if he was with his friends, a group of very different looking people, including the boy she knew was transgender, and two of the girls who were also present in the art studio, he ignored her completely. Even now, he continued scribbling furiously, refusing to meet her gaze, although she could see a faint blush on his ivory cheeks. And yet, if it was true, this boy had painted her in a manner so intimate and true that even now, as she stood in the doorway watching him, she felt a blush creep up on her own cheeks and neck.

_**xxxx**_

Clare was only thirty years old, in good health and not at all old, but the problem with working in high school, surrounded by hordes of perpetual teenagers, was that it made her _feel _old. She'd been twenty-two when she first started teaching, just a couple years older than the upperclassmen. She was now halfway though her eighth year at Degrassi, and each year that passed the students were eternally young, optimistic, eager, and unburdened by regret, while her own aging process seemed to accelerate, as if everyone around her had discovered a fountain of youth from which she was not allowed to drink. She remembered feeling, in her twenties, that the energy of her students was contagious. It infused itself in her own life. In those first teaching years, she'd never been more attractive to the opposite sex - not a weekend went by without a date, and sometimes she'd juggled as many as three of four guys at a time. Lately, though, they energy of her students simply filled her with envy, and poisoned even her own teenage memories, which now felt so vague and quaint and far awa. She hadn't been on a date in over eight months.

Sometimes she played a hypothetical game with herself, acceptable, she reasoned, because there wasn't a chance that she'd ever actually play it in real life. The game was this: _If _she were still in high school, which of her students would she have a crush on? She discovered that she had a type: popular athletes, big boys with close-shaved, neat haircuts, who wore their jerseys on Fridays; like Drew Torres and Luke Baker. Boys like Dave Turner who comfortably and confidently called out answers in class without raising their hands; boys who even if they didn't know the correct answer, somehow give it with such authority that it seemed like it was right.

The kind of boys who never gave her a second glance when she _was_ in high school.

She entertained herself with questions like: _If I were still eighteen, who would I want to go to prom with? If I was eighteen, who would I imagine kissing? _And more and more lately, she'd been allowing herself to think other, more intimate questions about some of the boys that sat before her each day, tripping earnestly over their French conjugates. Sometimes she felt guilty, but she also felt secretly smug that, being thirty, having slept with seven men, having been in three serious, long-term relationships, it was a virtual guarantee that she knew more about sex, had had more of it - at least number-wise - than even the most testosterone-riddled senior in the school. She knew that she should be moving on from her most recent disastrous breakup with Jake Martin by putting herself out there with men her own age instead of spending her Saturday nights crying over _Saturday Night Live, _accompanies by a bottle of wine and engaging in increasingly strange fantasies, but it still didn't stop her from thinking them.

Eli Goldsworthy was not the type of boy that she would have liked if she were in high school. Up until now, she had never looked at him in French class and wondered what his lips felt like. But now, when she looked at him as he worked with his chalks, his face obscured by a sheath of dark hair, and she thought of that line of cleavage, the sensitive rendering of her face fashioned by his smooth hands, she realized that our tastes change as we grow older. It's a sign of maturity.

It was all hypothetical, of course. She would never _act_ on it. She'd never acted on anything risky in her whole life, even when she _was _a teenager. But when Eli finally stopped his scribbling, put his pencil down, and slowly, deliberately, raised his dark eyes to meet hers, a blot of warmth spread from her chest down between her legs, a sudden and dangerous attraction, and she murmured a fumbling thank you before returning back into the sea of children in the hallway.

_**xxxx**_

The quickest way to begin a love affair with a student is to believe unequivocally that you are not the type of person who would ever do such a thing. This belief, coupled with an unfamiliarity with who you really are, allows you to put yourself in situations that a more honest person would recognize as dangerous and therefore avoid. Someone who wasn't purposefully naive, for example, would not have lingered in the fine arts hallway, gazing for a long time at amateur drawings of hands and feet, waiting for the building to clear. And after the hallways had cleared, a more responsible adult, one less shot-through with loneliness and misdirected narcissism, would not have seen the boy who had painted her and, feigning surprise, asked him where he lived, and finding out it was not too far out of the way, offered him a ride home.

"Are you sure that isn't weird?" he asked, as they fell into step and headed toward his locker where he could get his coat and his books - one of which, she saw, was the book of collected poems of E.E. Cummings that she knew Laura had assigned to her students.

"It's snowing," she said. "And freezing. Do you really want to have to wait for the bus?"

Eli looked out the hallway window at the whirling snow and shrugged.

"Do you like his poetry?" she asked, pointing to his book.

"It was okay," he said. He turned his back to her, put on his winter hat, pulling it low over her eyes, slung his bag over one shoulder, and started walking so quickly in the direction of the parking lot that Clare had no choice but to hurry behind him. She couldn't understand it - his behavior towards her indicated either complete indifference or active contempt. It didn't seem to fit. Why would you spend all that time drawing someone you despised? How could you depict them so beautifully and honestly if you didn't feel any connection to them?

At first, they were silent as they sat side by side in her Toyota Camry, waiting for the engine to warm up the vehicle. Outside, snow whirled, and they exhaled in icy puffs that soon fogged the windshield. Finally, Clare put the car in gear, and when she pulled out of the parking lot, she asked him, "Why did you paint me?"

Eli shurgged, "I don't know."

She was quiet for a moment. "You did a really beautiful job. I didn't know you were so artistic."

Silence.

More silence.

And even more silence.

"Can I ask you something, Eli?" she said finally. "Am I a good teacher? I mean, do the kids like me?"

She needed, badly, for him to tell her that they did. But he didn't say anything for at least half a minute. Finally, he conceded, "Well, they don't _dislike_ you."

"But... well, _you _must like me, right?" she continued hopefully. "Because, you know, you painted me."

"You were never supposed to see that," he said roughly. It was the first sign of emotion she had elicited from him. He had his phone out now, and was glaring down at it and texting someone with fast fingers. "Mrs. Dawes didn't tell us she was hanging those up. She hung up the ones that got A's, but she never asked us if she could."

"Did you not want me to see it?" she asked carefully.

"No!" he looked up from his phone and directed his glare at her.

"Why?"

"Because it was private. My friends all saw it, and they kept making fun of me about it, saying I have, you know, a crush on you or something."

Clare weighed her options and risks, a lifetime of not taking risks, a lifetime of not asking questions. She looked at him. They were stopped at a red light.

"Do you?"

His face was red, but it could have been from the cold or the wind. He looked out the window at a desolated parking lot of an abandoned building with extreme concentration. "I think you're pretty, if that's what you mean."

She should have told him that it was very sweet of him to say. She should have told him that it was nice to hear, if a little inappropriate, and that he was going to make some lucky girl his age very happy. But vanity won out, and as the light turned green and they accelerated softly through the snowy intersection, she said, "Well, I think you're handsome, Eli."

Handsome.

Pretty.

The words seemed to perch between the two of them for the rest of the silent car ride, stuffed uncomfortably in the cup holders.

_**xxxx**_

When she pulled up in front of the small brick apartment building where he lived, she watched as he gathered up his things, suddenly not wanting to see him go.

"So, who do you live with?"

"My mom and sister. Well, my sister is off at college in New York, so she only lives here during break."

"What about your mom?"

"She works the night shift, so I don't get to see her much."

"And your dad?"

"Died when I was thirteen."

"I'm sorry," she said softly. "You're alone a lot then, huh?"

"Yeah, I guess." he shrugged.

"What do you eat for dinner?"

"I don't know. Cereal, sometimes. Sometimes my mom makes me a plate of something and puts it in the fridge."

Clare touched his arm gently, in the way his mother might. "I don't like that thought - of you eating dinner by yourself. You're too young to be alone all the time like that."

He laughed a little. "What," he said, "you want to come up and make me dinner or something?"

_**xxxx**_

Being upstairs was jarring for both of them. Eli's demeanor changed dramatically once they were inside. He was no longer surly and guarded, but self-conscious and shy; he kept straightening things and apologizing because the small rooms smelled strongly of Glad Air Freshener and cat pee and fried food and his mother's cigarette smoke. He stood around the kitchen, watching his teacher as she rummaged through cabinets, while a small orange tabby cat wound its way around his legs.

"You don't have much in this house in the way of food, do you?" she asked.

He bet down and picked up the cat. "Told you."

Clare was determined to find something for him to eat in the barren cupboards and sparse refrigerator. She'd never had much maternal instinct, but now that she was alone with Eli in the quiet, warm apartment, she was feeling a sudden and strong desire to nurture him. She finally gathered the supplies for grilled cheese and Campbell's tomato soup. They ate together, quietly, in the small, narrow kitchen. Outside, the grey afternoon faded into an uneasy darkness.

It happened so seamlessly, it almost felt natural. When they finished eating, Eli stuck his long, skinny legs out straight in front of him and his feet brushed Clare's shins beneath the table. He made no effort to move them, but left them there, resting, his warm feet beneath his socks. It was an invitation, however subtle, and so, marveling at the disconnect between the things her head was telling her and the things her body was doing, Clare leaned over the the crumb-dusted plates and empty soup bowls, cupped Eli's face in her hands, and drew it towards her own. She kissed him with closed lips, then opened her mouth wider to let his pressing tongue inside, a sloppy kiss from a young boy who hadn't had many kissing years quite yet.

When they had stood up, still kissing across the table, and she'd pushed him gently against the refrigerator - a few coupons being held by magnets fluttering to the ground - and pressed the full length of her body against his and felt him rising against her, she whispered - because she _had _to, "We shouldn't be doing this," but she was relieved when he said, almost choking on his want, "I don't care," because then it felt that it was ridiculous to say that she was taking advantage of anyone. She remembered herself at seventeen, perhaps naive about some things, but still fully grown and certainly not a _child_. In less than a year, Eli would be old enough to fight in war, to die in war, even, and so it seemed ridiculous, this arbitrary age thing, when you came right down to it. When he ran his hands down to her waist, she reminded herself that society, so puritanical and hypocritical about sex, certainly hadn't come to consensus about when one truly leaves their childhood behind.

You have to be a certain age to drive, to fight, to drink alcohol; it was meaningless semantics. Eli was a person and Clare was a person, and in medieval times, he would have already been married and she would already be dead. And if they discovered that they loved each other, then wouldn't it be a waste to turn their backs on it because modern soap boxers had decided that they belonged in two different stages of life and that it was taboo to intersect, on a sexual level, those two arbitrary stages of being? And wasn't it true, she told herself stubbornly as Eli took her by the hand and led her into his dark bedroom - with his unmade twin-sized bed, and guitar case leaning against a dresser where t-shirts and jeans spilled out of open drawers - that the very idea of a teenager was a social construct invented sometime last century when people no longer had to help out with farm work and could afford to go to school for a bit longer?

Thus dispatching of the voice of her conscience with such logic, she fell onto the bed, he on top of her, and she felt herself moan at the weight of him, thinking to herself; how long had it been since she had last lain under a man? But when she pulled his sweatshirt over his head and looked upon his thin, frail body, the tiny, delicate nipples, the ladder of his chest bone, the absence of hair except for the two small, dark tufts under his arms, her conscience awoke. His body was shaking; either from pleasure or fear, she couldn't tell, but either way it was too late. The needs of her body and the desire to finally fulfill a reckless wish for returned youth had won out.

She asked him before her entered her if he was a virgin, and he told her he wasn't, and she suspected that he was lying, but she still didn't care. If she was taking something from him that couldn't be given back, then so be it. She would later tell herself that he wanted this even more than she did. He moved slowly inside of her, showing his inexperience, and it wasn't until she ran her nails down his back, telling him to move faster, that he finally caused a pleasurably burning feeling inside of her. When he began to shudder - sooner than she would have liked - grabbing at her hair in stunned pleasure, low grunts escaping his lips, she began whispering tenderly in his ear, "This is our secret; we can never tell anyone." He nodded promises, agreeing to anything at that moment if it meant that what just happened might happen again.

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Review, please! :)


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N:** Thank you for all the reviews! :) I am so sorry for the long wait. I just moved and I haven't had a computer to work on, but I promise it will not take long to update the final chapter. I know it was originally supposed to be five chapters, but I decided to combine the final two.

Apologizing in advance because I suck at writing smut and dialogue (actually, I just don't like writing dialogue).

* * *

They began seeing each other as many as three times a week. Sometimes she would linger in the language office after school, and if he walked by and looked at her through the windows, she knew that instead of going home, she would drive in the opposite direction to his mother's apartment. Other times, she would leave school and pick him up at the small café a few blocks from school. Once, wild with the forbiddenness of it all, they had sex right there in her car behind the café, next to the dumpsters; the cold winter air hidden by the heat radiating off their bodies, and she had driven him home after in satisfied silence.

It was a happy time; so happy that she managed to forgive herself for the criminality of it. The fear of getting caught never really went away, but it was pushed away easily by her delusions. She had been lonely for so long, and she felt that she deserved this long-awaited happiness. She rehearsed her justifications so often that she almost wished there was someone who knew about it to challenge her. Her only wish was that Eli was eighteen, but his birthday wasn't until June, and if they could last that long... well, who knew where things might go from there.

But in a way, it was only sex. A woman her age ought to have realized that, ought to have known better, but she had justifications for that too. They couldn't go to places together; he couldn't take her out to a nice dinner (not that his unemployed self could afford dinner at an even somewhat fancy restaurant) or out to see a movie. They couldn't talk on the phone all night about each other's days and sit in a comfortable silence while listening to each other's soft breathing. They couldn't get to know each others families and suffer through that first awkward family dinner. And so, their entire life together centered around those hours after school in his twin bed or in the backseat of her car; and yet that life was more fulfilling for her than what she'd had most recently with Jake.

Eli was the silent type; she never worried that he would be indiscreet, that he would brag to his friends about the conquest, and it amazed her how well he could play his part. In class, he was the same brooding, back-row presence as ever; the only difference was that he no longer seemed to sneer at her. He continued to turn in his homework with the same above average - but not superior - effort.

Alone together, he was someone else entirely. He was guileless and over-flowing with feeling. He had opened up to her about his father's death, his mother's alcohol problem, his sister's desperate need to leave Toronto, and his own loneliness and depression. He was also passionate; always holding her tightly - possessively in a way - and kissing her with fervor she didn't know a seventeen year old could possess. In the weeks of their relationship, he seemed to grow up right before her eyes; a fumbling, inexperienced lover in the first week, to a confident, commandeering lover, unafraid to try new thing, asking for whatever he wanted and getting it.

One afternoon in early March, when it was still bitterly, unseasonably cold, Clare and Eli were lying naked in his bed, while outside, wind rattled the thin panes of his bedroom windows.

"I still haven't gotten over the fact," he said, trailing a finger down her bare arm, "that every day I have to sit in class and watch you teach, when all I'm doing is picturing you naked. I mean, lots of kids probably picture their teachers naked. It's just... I can't believe I actually get to see it." He lifted the covers and examined the length of her body.

"Don't!" Clare squealed, pulling them back around her. "You know I'm self-conscious."

"I know," he said, lifting the blanket to peak again. "But I don't get why." He reached underneath the blanket to squeeze her waist. She loved the way he could not keep his hands off her; whether he was being sweet by massaging her back and shoulders or being sensual by groping her breasts, he always made her feel a bit less insecure about her body.

"Because I'm _old_, and the only other bodies you have seen are _young_."

"You're not _that _old. Besides, you're gorgeous."

She curled up against his thin, smooth body, warmed by the compliment. When he said tender things to her, it was always with an earnestness that she felt could not have been replaced by a man her own age.

"You know, you have a lot more to lose from this than I do," he said.

"I know that."

"So why risk it? Why risk your job and your reputation and everything else, just for me? I'm seventeen and I have no idea what I'm doing with my life. Why not be with someone your age who has his shit together?"

It was a good question; one that she had considered often on her drives home alone through the dark winter streets. She leaned on an elbow and looked at him.

"Well, I've been trying not to say things around you like, 'when you're older'... but it's true. When you get older, it's a lot harder to find people who really understand you. It's a lot rarer than you might think. My ex-boyfriend is a construction worker; he never understood my love for literature and couldn't speak French if his life depended on it."

"And you feel like I understand you?"

She nodded, smiling. "Yes. Plus, you read almost as much as I do, _and _you speak fluent French. You're borderline perfect... for me at least."

He stared at her intently, a small - barely noticeable - smile on his lips. "Do you love me?"

"Would it scare you if I said yes?"

"No."

"Then yes. Yes, I love you. Do you love me?"

"Yeah, I do," he said almost inaudibly. "Would it scare you if I said I'm _in_ love with you?"

"You honestly think you're in love with me?"

He nodded sheepishly, "I've never felt like this before."

"That's because our relationship is sex," she said, and he let out a small snort.

"It is, Eli, and that's all it is. We don't go on cute dates, we don't stay up on the phone all night, and the only way I can meet your mother is as your teacher at parent-teacher conferences, _not _as your girlfriend. What we have is an affair, Eli."

"I don't care. I'm in love with you, Clare," he said. "I want to go on dates and talk to you on the phone all night. I want you to meet my mom as my girlfriend, and I want her to love you and treat you as if you're her own daughter. I want all of that, Clare."

"You can't-"

He interrupted, "I'll be eighteen in three months, so-" but was quickly interrupted back.

"I will _still_ be your teacher, and you will _still _be my student, and all of this will _still _be against the law. Don't you get it, Eli?"

"Yes, I get it, but I don't care. I love you, and I just want to be with you," he said.

She placed her hands on his chest, and felt his erratic heartbeat. "I love you too, Eli. I-"

"But are you _in_ love with me?"

"I-I don't know."

He sighed deeply and gripped her hips, pulling her on top of him. He kissed her, deep and sloppy, while digging his fingers into the skin of her back, and entered her for the second time that afternoon. He held her in an almost bruising grip as she moved over him at an erratic, sloppy pace, their moans and gasps filling the air. He groped her breasts roughly, feeling himself coming undone, and flipped them over, thrusting into her quickly. She ran her fingers through his hair, tugging harshly - something she always did as she reached her climax - and soon let out a loud moan, shuddering underneath him. He came after her, groaning into the smooth skin of her neck, leaving soft kisses on the surface as he regained his breath. He pulled out and rolled over, lying his head on her chest and listened to her rapid heartbeat.

She gently ran her fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp. "I love you, Eli," she whispered. "I love you so much."

He raised his head and kissed her softly, smiling after their lips separated. "I love you too, Clare."

He rested his head on her chest once again, and they drifted off to a peaceful sleep, nested beneath his blankets like a pair of baby birds.

_**xxxx**_

She awoke in the disorienting sudden light. She sat up, squinting, and saw a woman standing in the doorway.

"Mom," she heard Eli begin, and the pleading, childish fear in his voice triggered her recognition. She had seen the woman at parent-teacher conferences; a kindly face, nodding and always in awe of her son's excellence.

Clare bolt upright, feeling exactly how she had felt at age twenty when her car had spun out of control on the highway during a snowstorm: absolute and total fear for her life; waiting for the impact, and the bright white lights, and then nothingness or heaven or hell. Instead, the car had swung past an oncoming semi by inches and slid gently into a snow-softened ditch.

Eli's mother began to shout, and Clare tripped out of the tangle of bed sheets, reaching blindly for a scrap of clothing utterly naked. Eli, sitting up in bed now, was defending Clare wildly, and before Clare knew it, Mrs. Goldsworthy picked up a dusty Little League trophy from Eli's dresser and hurled it in her direction. She ducked and it smashed into the wall, chipping paint. There were more screams, more objects thrown, and Eli hopping out of bed and approaching his mother.

Crouching, Clare swept up pieces of clothing blindly from the carpeted floor. She then took a deep breath, and covering her face with a shirt, slipped through the doorway past Eli's mother, who tried to block her, but was stopped by Eli. Wild with adrenaline, Clare tripped and fell in the living room, hitting her chin on the coffee table, but stumbled back to her feet, grabbed her purse, and bolted down the stairs and out the front door.

Outside, it was so cold, and the tree branches, bare and skeletal, emptied of life, swayed ominously. The streets were slicked with dirty ice, and she ran towards it, forgetting where she parked, the cold pulsing up from the sidewalk and numbing her bare feet, so she was half-running, half-hobbling. Piles of snow, discolored and molded by snow plows into deformed mountains, gaped at her, and she turned around, half-expecting her Eli's mother to be coming behind her - she could still hear the screaming - but instead she saw her car. She fumbled with her keys, her hands shaking, and started the engine, blasted the heat which only blew stale, freezing air that made her bare nipples ache, and pulled away and quickly found a gas station. She ignored the strange faces outside - mute and uniform, wrapped in scarves and drooping hats - as she pulled on the clothes she had salvaged: a t-shirt of Eli's - soft and smelling of him - her pink underwear, and the black pencil skirt she had worn to work that day, but no nylons, no bra, no shoes, and no coat.

When she arrived at her apartment complex, she crunched through the snow in her bare feet, up the steps of her building which had never felt longer, and crawled under a thick blanket on the couch, dripping and sobbing, and clutched her silent phone until she could feel her feet and hands again.

One thing was for sure, she decided while huddled under the blanket: she could not go to work tomorrow. What if Mrs. Goldsworthy recognized her face? She had to have because why else would she be so upset? Catching your son in bed with his girlfriend wouldn't cause you to throw a trophy at her, would it? These questions plagued Clare's thoughts, as well as the repercussions. If they caught her, she might go to jail. She certainly would never teach again. She might have to register as a sex offender and go door to door and tell her neighbors to keep their children away from her.

All of her worst nightmares would come true, and for what? Had the last month of passion really been worth it? Had it really been love? She had been so sure only hours ago, but now she was not so sure anymore. She was not thinking of Eli's misery; he was young, and the victim, and would bounce back. She was now thinking of only herself.

She called in sick for two days until, mercifully, the weekend came. She never left her apartment once. She read online newspapers obsessively and watched the morning, afternoon, and evening news. She half expected the cops to show up at her door or the principal to make a condemnatory phone call. She checked her work email with grim obsessiveness because if it were to come to light, she wanted to know right away. But the only email she had received of a personal nature was from her Laura, who had substituted for her French I period, saying she could not find the DVD to show her classes, and the students had been given a free period instead.

_Feel better soon, Clare!_ she had added end of the email, and the bright innocence of the well-wishing, as well as the mundane nature of the email, made Clare feel even worse. It brought to her attention that it would never so much as cross the minds of teachers like Laura or Darryl or Winnie to compromise their integrity or to slide into perversion with a student in order to feel loved or validated. They gained their students' affection the old-fashioned way; by being kind and interesting and fair. The contrast made Clare realize her failings not just as a teacher, but as a human being. The fact that Laura thought she would even care that a DVD had gone missing - as if it might be Laura's definition of a bad day at work - sent her dissolving into torrents of tears.

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Review, please! :)


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N: **I'm so sorry for the long wait! I was having some trouble writing this chapter and I didn't have a lot of computer access. This is the last chapter and I'm not sure if you'll all like it, but I hope you do. It's pretty short and not as good as the first three, and I'm sorry for that. I'm also working on another story, but knowing me, I'll probably take forever to actually upload it. But I hope you read it once it's posted. :)

PS. I was in a hurry to finish and post this, so ignore any mistakes if any!

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She did not hear from Eli - why would she? She had never given him her phone number, to diminish the evidence and prevent them from getting caught. Yet, she had expected, or perhaps hoped, that he would have managed to track her down. But the truth was, she only wanted to speak to him to find out if his mother knew, and if she did, whether she would tell. She loathed herself for being so self-serving, but she figured, how many teenage boys get caught with girls in their beds? If Mrs. Goldsworthy had not recognized her (and with no word in four days, she was beginning to hold hope), the matter might have already blown over in their household.

He had been right: it was she who had something to lose from this whole mess, not him. She resented him for it, and she would have hated him if she had the energy. _He_ had been the one to start it. Of all the teachers at Degrassi, _he_ had drawn her. _He _unbuttoned her shirt with his paintbrush, for God's sake. _He _had seen her desperation and _he _tempted her. Yes, she offered him a ride home, but _he _invited her upstairs. _He_ rested his legs against hers. The kid was almost eighteen. He had known exactly what he was doing. And now it was _her _whose life was going to ruin.

But at the same tie, she felt a worsening guilt, like she had stepped in something cold and it was seeping into her blood. She dreaded seeing him again. It would remind her of her shame, her descent into hedonism and lies, and how far she had gone to assured she was still attractive. She was pathetic. She had no desire to ever touch him again, for the guilt and shame made her sick to her stomach (although she knew that thought would change as soon as she saw him again, proof of how truly pathetic she was).

She cried almost continuously, not really for what had happened that night, but for what had always been happening to her, every moment since the day she had begun to teach high school, which was that he life was moving forward, aging, ending, while somewhere - everywhere - there would always be people who were young. Why hadn't she chosen to break the rules and lie and cheat and fall for the wrong guy when she herself was seventeen, when almost any bad behavior could be chalked up to age? What excuse, at thirty, did she have?

On Monday, having not heard otherwise, Clare went to work. Her hands trembled on the steering wheel; she pulled over to the side of the road once to throw up the banana she had eaten for breakfast. She had imagined every possible public scene, every ignominious humiliation. When she arrived at school, she walked past the bulletin board, her heart sinking, and saw that the portraits had all been taken down and replaced with angular, penciled blueprints from Beginning Architecture. In the department office, no one had looked at her strangely; no one avoided her eyes, but they all asked if she was feeling better. She nodded shortly and murmured something about the stomach flu, barely bothering to pretend to lie anymore. She waited for someone to say Eli's name; if they had, she would have confessed everything instantly.

But nobody did. The bell rang for first period, and her freshmen greeted her as usual. Nobody asked where she had been. The class was conducted with complete normalcy. She introduced the new vocabulary list, household items, and listened as the students drearily repeated the words after her. She checked in the homework; three students had failed to complete it. She dutifully marked a zero next to each of their names in her gradebook. They weren't apologetic, and she wasn't angry. It was just the way things happened.

Second period (French II) was much the same, except this time eight students did not complete the homework assignment, and she felt compelled to halfheartedly reprimand the class and remind them that the end of the third quarter was two weeks away. Then she continued with household items as they dutifully repeated the words multiple times.

By lunchtime, she felt a weariness inside her that reached to her depths. It was exhausting, waiting for a mocking look from a student, or for Dr. Raditch, the school principal, to appear at her classroom door. It was exhausting waiting for seventh period AP French, and for the sleepy, dark, knowing eyes of Eli in the back of the room. Would he wait for her after class and explain developments? Would he tell her his mother hadn't known? Would he tell her had been grounded? Would he go back to his sneering? Would he tell her he still loved her? Would she have to tell him it was over?

She had not considered that perhaps he would not be there at all, and that is exactly what happened. His desk sat empty, silent, without explanation. She thought of asking her students where he was, but did not trust herself to speak his name without giving it all away. Her students worked on their vocabulary and conjugates for they had a test that week, as she sat at her desk. She forced herself not to look at the empty desk in the back of the class, not to wait like a hopeful dog for him to appear in the doorway.

He was not there the next day either, or the one after that. Clare thought she would go mad, but she did not dare to ask his whereabouts. She suffered in silence as her students took their unit test. Finally, that Friday, at the end of the day, she received an email from the registrar's office. It read:

_Subject: Notice of Student withdrawal_

_Teachers,_

_Student Elijah Goldsworthy ID 148502 has withdrawn from all classes effective March 16, 2012. Please send student's current grade to the registrar's office and update your class list._

There was nothing more, no explanation, no forwarding address. He was gone from her class, gone from Degrassi, gone from her life. She emailed the registrar's office with the only meager gift to him she could think of: she changed his grade from an 85 to a 91. She hoped that he would see it on his transcript and take it as a secret message of goodwill.

She began to wonder: was it possible that she would get away with it, that she had done something that should have destroyed her life and yet, mercifully, her sin would go unaccounted? Did this happen often, bad deeds going unpunished? Up until Eli, Clare had always operated under the assumption that she would not get away with anything. How different might her life have been if she had discovered earlier that sometimes she would? Though she ached to know where and why he had gone and if he was alright, her desire to assure his well-being was eclipsed by the sheer joy of realizing that her life was not going to fall apart, that she would not be raked across the coals of public opinion, turned out for a harlot, fired, and arrested. She put her head in her hands and began to cry out - of what, she was not sure - but her emotions had gotten the best of her yet again and she cried as she sat at her desk, staring at the email in front of her.

"Miss Edwards?" she heard a voice at the door. She turned around and was face to face with the pale and lanky boy she knew was Eli's friend.

"Hi," she said, wiping the tears off her face. "Adam, right? You're on the boy's volleyball team?"

"Yeah, that's me. I-" he paused and Clare could see the uncomfortable look on his face as he slowly entered her room.

"Sorry about this," she said gesturing to her face. "I'm just going through some stuff right now."

"I know. I... I'm here because of Eli."

The sound of his name made her heart speed up and she felt her palms sweat. "W-what about him?"

Adam sighed and sat on the chair in front of her desk. "I know what happened between you two. He told me earlier this week and... I'm shocked, like... I don't know what to think. It's weird, you know?"

"Trust me, I know."

"I'm here because Eli would not shut up about you and he wanted me to tell you that he's sorry. He would tell you himself, but his mom knows it was you. It's why they left town. She-"

"Sh-she knows I slept with her son? And she didn't report it?"

"Eli's mom... she's an alcoholic, like it's _really_ bad. I don't know if Eli ever talked to you about his family, probably not, but she's been like this since his dad died. She didn't want to make this a big deal legally because she wouldn't be able to handle it. She works part-time at some shitty diner in town and spends the rest of her time at the bar. She can barely afford to pay bills, let alone a lawyer or anything and she doesn't want him near you, so she figured the best thing to do would be to send Eli away."

"Send him away? Where?"

"Some private school in New York. His sister goes to college out there and lives with their grandparents, so she sent Eli there, I guess."

"I'm sorry. I- this is all my fault."

"It takes two to - well, you know. I just can't believe this happened. He's my best friend and he didn't even tell me."

"It's not exactly something you can tell people," she said as she watched the boy stand up.

"I know. I want to be mad at him, but I can't. I mean, you can't help who you fall in love with."

"Do you really think he was in love with me?"

He nodded. "You're seriously all he talks about now that I know. I kind of liked it better when I didn't because it's all I ever hear now. And no offense, but I can only hear about your eyes or your smile or whatever so many times before I want to rip my ears off."

Clare blushed. "Can you tell him something for me?"

"Sure."

"Tell him I'm sorry for everything, and that I love him. And I know this sounds kind of harsh, but tell him to get over me. Please."

He nodded. "Okay. I have to go, my mom is probably waiting for me outside."

"Thank you, Adam. I-I probably would have gone crazy if I hadn't found out what happened to him."

The boy smiled at her and then walked out of her classroom. She sighed and rubbed her temples with her index and middle fingers. She was getting away with it. She would not lose her job. She would not go to jail. She would not be the talk of the town for the next few months. Eli was gone. She was free.

**xxxxx**

She managed to last three more months, until the end of the year, before putting in for her resignation. It was too exhausting, having to sit in that school all day feeling dirty and guilty. She did not believe in herself as a teacher anymore, nor trust herself as a person. In June, she took a job at a bank, increasing her salary by forty percent. The work was much easier and quieter and more tedious; whereas before she had been encouraged to circle the classroom and grade papers and teach lessons, now nothing was asked of her but stay behind a window, counting crisp increments of other people's money.

She was unhappy with her job; she did not know how much she had loved her old job until she left it: the rituous volume in the hallways, the new-found boyfriend and girlfriends smiling gummily and unself-consciously at each other on the benches outside of school, the cacophonous slamming of lockers during passing periods, the pep rallies and the bake sales, the fundraisers and assemblies and variety shows, the sporting events and dances. Surrounded by adults all the time now, the only time she saw high school students was on the bus, and the change in perspective made her realize, with a shiver of self-disgust that they were still just kids.

Five years after she quit her job at Degrassi, she was at the small cafe in town, eating a salad on her lunch break with a friend from the bank. She recognized Eli the moment he opened the door, even though he was a young man now - twenty-three - with a shorter hair cut and subtle facial hair. He was not awkwardly high-school skinny anymore; he had gained weight in his arms, shoulders, and stomach, but appeared to be toned. He was still very young and very, _very_ handsome. The old sullenness and skinny jeans and band tees were gone, and he was dressed in a way that indicated success had either arrived or was not very far off.

He was accompanied by a pretty girl with long, brown hair, and red-glossed lips. She was visibly pregnant, but still very small, and wore a light blue maternity dress. A small chip of diamond flashed on her left hand. Clare recognized her as the quirky, artistic odd-ball girl in Eli's group of friends, but could have sworn she was a lesbian. Clare began to wonder if she was and it was a surrogate baby, but when she saw Eli wrap his arm around her lower back and place a kiss on her temple, the idea was shot.

Clare could not look away in time; Eli looked at her directly. There was a tremor of recognition on his face, and she reached up and smoothed her hair self-consciously, thanking God that she had just been to see her colorist and wishing she had reapplied gloss to her lips, whose color without it was a pale, anemic pink. She was happy that she was sitting so that he could not see the thickening of her own middle, reminding herself that she was involved with someone seriously now - Allen, who worked in the bank's regional offices, was forty-two and divorced, balding, kind, but with a tendency to fall asleep during movies - reminding herself that she was successful and content and that life had gotten much better for her since that mixed-up time.

Eli glanced at her for only a moment, and the look in his still-sleepy eyes was inscrutable. Then he put a protective arm around the glowing girl, drew her close to him, whispered something into her ear, and the two of them, laughing privately, turned around and walked out of the restaurant.

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I hope you all liked this story. Review? :)


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